Field
The present application is related to management of emergency multimedia data and, more specifically, systems, apparatus, and methods for collaborative and distributed emergency multimedia data management.
Background
Emergency response systems may feature very limited capabilities. The emergency system in the U.S., for example, was designed and built several years ago. This system allowed people to place an emergency voice call over a circuit switched network. The system routed the call to an appropriate call center geographically capable of initiating a response to the emergency. To determine the geographic location of a caller, various third party systems were introduced to, for example, provide a look-up service based on the originating phone number. Similarly, an identity system was introduced to provide a number look-up service for the originating communication.
Once the information was dispatched to a call center, the capabilities of the receiving agent were limited. The circuit switched nature of the call limited the ability of an agent to transfer or conference an active call to other entities. Furthermore, transmitting data generated during the call was often decoupled from the call itself. No reliable way was available to reconstruct the events of a given call, let alone several calls related to a similar incident. Additionally, the interfaces were essentially all-or-nothing interfaces in the sense that because of the tight integration with the circuit switch voice systems, entire applications may include features that may not be applicable to all agents. This affected the installation and cost of maintaining call center systems.
To the extent call centers were integrated with other systems, the interface was cumbersome. As previously mentioned, the user interfaces were generally tightly integrated with the circuit switched voice system. Sharing data from the call center with, for example, other call centers or a centralized dispatch station could be fragmented. There also was limited capability to receive information (e.g., feedback) for a transferred event.
Accordingly, improvements in the management of emergency response data are desirable, particularly, as emergency response systems are migrating from a circuit switched network to a packet switched network. In this packet switched world, it would further be desirable to have a system that can efficiently accept emergency information such as voice, text messages, video messages, streaming video, and email and which can correlate the information in a meaningful way to provide situational awareness to a given input, set of inputs, and overall incident.